Samsung was hit with a patent infringement lawsuit yesterday over an emoticon patent (see below). Plaintiff Varia Holdings LLC charges that Samsung mobile phones violate its 2007 U.S. Patent (No. 7,167,731) for an “Emoticon Input Method and Apparatus.”
Varia Holdings took a jab at the electronics giant, charging that “Samsung is a prolific patent filer that actively protects its intellectual property,” but allegedly infringes the rights of others.
Of course, there are a few twists to this case.
It’s like a scene from the Wizard of Oz: Righthaven is almost dead as a corporate entity.
Yesterday U.S. District Judge Philip Pro ordered “the transfer of all of Righthaven’s intellectual property and intangible property” — including 278 registered works filed with the U.S. Copyright Office — to court-appointed receiver Lara Pearson tasked with breaking up Righthaven’s assets (read it below).
The order stemmed from an earlier judgment against Righthaven’s for $34,000+ in attorneys fees owed to Wayne Hoehn, a Vietnam vet who successfully got Righthaven’s copyright lawsuit against him dismissed.
Until last year, the Righthaven litigation machine shook down consumers for unfounded copyright violations to intellectual property. But Righthaven defendants had an epiphany moment.
The federal judge presiding over the lawsuit by plaintiff Paul Ceglia, the convicted felon claiming to own half of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, just ordered Google to divulge Ceglia’s Gmail account data and logs by March 5, 2012
Ceglia’s email accounts are at the heart of this lawsuit. Some were known, many were only recently discovered by lawyers for Zuckerberg and Facebook after an electronic forensics investigator learned about four previously previously unknown webmail accounts held by Ceglia. The electronic discovery could shed light on whether or not the contract he claims gives him a fifty-percent ownership stake in Facebook is real, or the fabrication that Facebook and Zuckerberg’s lawyers say it is.
Three GOP presidential candidates got slapped with a patent infringement suit yesterday (read it below) by a California partnership that holds a patent with social media implications for the candidates’ Facebook pages.
EveryMD, a California partnership, contends that one of its patents that enables individual Facebook members like Defendants Santorum, Romney, and Gingrich “to create individual home pages (‘Facebook Pages’).” Instead of suing Facebook, however, EveryMD opted to sue the GOP presidential candidates.
What makes this lawsuit particularly fascinating is that it comes on the heels of plaintiff’s unsuccessful attempts to get Facebook to buy its patent. (view the patent below).
The U.S. Magistrate Judge overseeing Paul Ceglia’s ownership claim case against Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook ordered Ceglia to pay nearly $76,000 in attorneys’ fees to Facebook’s and Zuckerberg’s lawyers for having to repeatedly go to court to compel Cegila to comply with the judge’s earlier orders.
That is in addition to the $5,000 in sanctions that a judge order Ceglia to pay last month.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Leslie G. Foschio’s only reduced the $84,196 that Facebook sought in attorneys’ fees by 10% in order “to ‘trim’ any ‘fat.'”
Magistrate Judge Foschio’s 39-page decision and order (you can read it below) painstakingly details the legal morass that this litigation has become.
The Associated Press (AP) filed a copyright lawsuit in federal court this morning against the Meltwater Group over the company’s Meltwater News product, charging that the competing site collects, stores, translates, and redistributes AP content to paid subscribers, but without paying the 165-year-old company a penny. Other online news aggregators like Google, Yahoo, and AOL pay licensing fees to use AP content, as do local and national newspapers and media sites.
According to the lawsuit, Meltwater generated more than $100 million in revenue in 2010, in part because it doesn’t pay a thing for content:
Silicon Valley-based solar panel giant SunPower sued five former employees and competitor SolarCity today, contending that shortly before they left SunPower, the employees connected USB drives to the company’s computer network, “and used them to steal tens-of-thousands of computer files” with confidential and non-confidential proprietary information.
In addition to civil damages and injunctive relief, SunPower also wants to hold the ex-employees criminally liable for violating a California law prohibiting unauthorized computer data access and fraud.
The case raises important questions about what, if any, data loss prevention (DLP) systems were in place to prevent employee theft and the loss of such highly confidential and proprietary data. How could the alleged data transfer of information on hundreds of millions of dollars in sales at a Silicon Valley company occur so brazenly?
Any antitrust concerns about Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility were satisfied in Europe and the United States today. Regulatory hurdles were cleared when the European Union and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division each approved Google’s purchase of the telecom unit.
The deal bolsters Google’s patent portfolio, and is anticipated to add substantial value to the company’s Android mobile operating system.
Montblanc, the German maker of fabled fountain pens and other luxury goods sued Google for help in unmasking the identities of alleged counterfeiters running Google AdWords campaigns on Google’s UK search engine to hawk knockoff pens.
Montblanc’s lawsuit against Google asks the court for equitable relief, i.e.,, not money but a court order granting the penmaker discovery to unmask and confirm the identity of the person or entity placing misleading ads on Google.
In pre-Super Bowl style, prosecutors charged a Michigan man with criminal copyright violations for allegedly operating nine (9) websites chock full of pirated sports broadcast videos (read the complaint below).
Separately, federal agents also seized a purported $4.8 million in knock-off Super Bowl merchandise imported into the U.S.
The U.S. Attorney’s message? Don’t risk any high-tech copyright shenanigans with unauthorized streams of this Sunday’s Super Bowl XLVI.
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